[Excerpts] ...

[...]



When I got off shift one afternoon, I noticed something was up. All the internees in the highwalled, barbed-wired “quarantine compound” were being moved to other parts of the camp.

What the heck was going on?

[excerpt]

It was June nineteenth [1944] and head-count time on the roll-call field.

I remember the date exactly, because as I was trying to ignore the indignity of the moment and savoring my day off, an outbreak took place that had guards suddenly exploding in all directions like firecrackers. After lots of shouting and yelling, one peeled out of the group and rushed off for King Kong.

We were all standing around stunned, and except for intermittent yelps from the remaining guards, the silence was deadly.

Finally, Jock went over to the warden of the men’s dorm section, where the eruption had taken place, and asked what had happened. After a while, I saw him nod, and coming back to our line, he whispered to Dad, “Laurie Tipton and Arthur Hummel have escaped, and the guards have just found out. Pass it down the line, but hold the applause.”

When King Kong arrived, he was livid with rage and had the nine men who were dorm-mates of the escapees pulled out of line and marched off to the Assembly Hall, where they were put under heavy guard. We didn’t like that, but there was nothing we could do about it, except pray that they wouldn’t be tortured to give out information about the escape.

The hall was put out of bounds, and they were held for eleven days on starvation rations, while they were interrogated mercilessly, but none of them could tell the Japanese a thing, because they hadn’t known of the escape—which took place on the sixth—till after it had happened. The only crime they could be accused of, if it could be considered a crime, was that of covering up the escape by juggling places in the roll-call lineup to confuse the guards and buy time for Tip and Arthur to get well away.

When Gold Tooth couldn’t get confessions out of the men, King Kong put out an official press release that was carried in all the local papers. According to Dad, who translated the write-up, it said nine men had escaped, but seven had been recaptured. “That’s the Oriental way of saving face, or covering one’s arse,” he said wryly.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/MushroomYears/Masters(pages).pdf

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